Exploring, pt. 1: frogs

This isn't fiction, it's straight-up journalism, memoir, whatever you want to call it. This part reads like a narrative, but it's a setup for the later parts where I'll get into more CI-esque stuff, like an analysis of what I thought and all that.

“I swear there’s a frog in there,” I said, leaning over the back of the bench we were sitting on and pointing to the ground, covered in leafy vines and grasses.

“There are no frogs. Trust me, I know this place. Not enough water. If you want to see frogs, sometime I’ll show you where there are frogs at Goucher.”

It didn’t seem at the time like there wasn’t enough water to support amphibian life. We had taken shelter under a gazebo on the Hopkins campus because it was raining, and it was the jerky motions of the leaves under the falling drops that kept catching my eye and convincing me there were frogs. He’d driven us to Hopkins after we had dessert and we’d spent the rest of the evening sitting under the gazebo talking. By midnight we’d been talking for over an hour about faith, with me interrupting multiple times to insist that I’d seen a frog. We swapped stories - mine first, then his, which turned out to be almost the exact opposite of mine, in a mirror-image sort of way rather than an antagonistic one. I was fascinated. It wasn’t a perspective I’d ever encountered before.

He didn’t consider himself a believer, though he didn’t have the angrily exasperated edge that most atheists I know have. He willingly conceded that religion and religious communities have a place in our world and do a lot of people good. The admission that certain people use faith to hurt themselves or others wasn’t followed by the conclusion that faith was therefore wrong all the time or for everyone. There was no adamant rejection of the principles of faith and no refusal to have anything to do with religion. When discussing his transition into a nonbeliever, he said it was the realization that “sitting on a bench is really no different from praying on a bench, except maybe that your eyes are closed,” but there was no value judgment that said praying on a bench was stupid, damaging or inferior to sitting on a bench, just that he didn’t see or feel a difference. It’s hard to summarize here for two reasons – one, it would require me to recall almost completely a conversation that lasted over an hour and two, I don’t know how much was shared in confidence – so I’m presenting the impression that I got, not retelling what he said to me.

A few days later he said he wanted to get brunch on Sunday morning but thought we should “bump into each other” sometime before that. I figured some great plan was being set in motion but I really had no idea what his scheme was. We met up Saturday evening and he asked what I wanted to do. I demanded that he show me where the frogs were, so we walked through the woods to a small pond I didn’t know existed. When we walked up, talking loudly, at least six frogs jumped from the bank into the water. I was thrilled. I spent some time stalking around the bank trying to catch one but gave up because I wasn’t wearing the right shoes and was recovering from pinkeye so I couldn’t see anything in the fading light.

We sat down on two rusted folding chairs overlooking the pond and I asked what, exactly, we were doing out there.

“I thought we ought to talk about what to do tomorrow morning,” he said. “What do you think?”

I was about to say I thought we were just going to brunch, when he pulled some papers from his pocket and said, “because I thought,” he flicked open the folded papers with a flourish, “we could go to church.” I took a few seconds to admire his delivery before what he had said actually registered.

“What?”

He held out the printed papers towards me. He’d researched some churches in the area and had printouts from their websites. “We were talking about it the other night, and we’re both interested, and I figured we’d, you know, just go check one out together.” He suggested one in particular because we’d passed it on our way to the movies the previous week and I’d admired the building. I vetoed it, though, because it was Baptist and in my experience Baptist churches are associated with everything I dislike about interpreted Christianity. That left us with a Unitarian Universalist church and a Methodist one, which he said was just like the church he was raised in and used to.

We talked for a while about our options. He went through the Methodist program and talked about the doxology and hymns and other elements. I’ve been to a few services like that, but at my church at home things are radically different. Instead of hymns we sing contemporary worship and there’s an emphasis on a personal relationship with God, so there’s no recited prayer and things are very casual. He told me that he likes the routine and the tradition because things get comfortable and familiar, and that’s what he enjoyed at church. I said I didn’t understand the appeal.

“There’s no relationship in that,” I told him. “You’re not connecting. I’m sitting here, with you, and I’m saying whatever comes to my mind, whatever I feel like saying right now. I’m not reading from a book of Things To Say To Boys You’re Sitting By Ponds With.”

He laughed at that. “That’s a great title for a story.” After some deliberation, we picked the UU one, since it would be different for both of us. "Alright, I'll pick you up tomorrow at 10:30."